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Wolvark
Wolvarks are lazy, incompetent, and deceptively crafty humanoids with greenish yellow skin, large guts, and cartoonishly comical underbites. They’ve been around for about as long as the Steef, who swear them as mortal enemies. Unlike their sworn foes, wolvarks don’t have a lot going for them on the evolutionary scale, and often they’ll resort to using tools stolen from surrounding cultures to get a leg up on game or enemies. Creation These guys are famously known to the Thayarre as “the bastard children” and to this day none of the gods have officially stepped forward to claim that they made the Wolvarks. They cropped up very shortly after Bralg made the first few tribes of Steef, and the theory goes that a jealous spirit or god tried their best at creating the poor bastards to stick it to Bralg. Life A Wolvark’s lot in life is mere steps above abysmal. One of the few places in the entire world where a Wolvark can eck out an existence better than any of the other races tends to be in salt marshes; their ugly, scaled skin seems to be tolerant to the caustic slop that washes into the cesspits that they’re forced to claim as territory, and the krill and shrimp that love the swamps as much as they do serve as their primary meal for the majority of the beginning of their lives. Unfortunately Wolvarks were never given the gift of words by the gods, nor were they ever granted the inspiration to build or create by Alma. This means that Wolvark society only tends to bubble in places where they can mimic and steal from a neighbor. Wolvarks that live near Steef tend to speak Old Tongue, and generally know how to craft simple stone tools; Wolvarks who live near State cities however sway to speaking Newtongue, and generally have steel weapons. Wolvarks love guns, and generally anything explosive, they seem naturally drawn to the destructive nature of objects that make loud noises and clouds of smoke; some scholars speculate that this is an expression of their lost and untapped potential, which makes them glad that that potential was never reached. Wolvarks also maintain a lot of habits which seem genetically encoded into their systems. Spawns of Wolvarks tend to consist of about forty to a hundred eggs (per female), with about eighty percent of the hatchlings being male. Upon reaching adulthood (which usually comes fast) males tend to leave their spawning grounds in small bands of three to ten. The “runty” males are usually deigned inappropriate for the life of skullduggery, and are left behind to spawn the next generation with the females. Meanwhile the bands of strong males split up looking for adventure and fortune, usually this consists of stealing, cheating and killing. While the steef have never had a huge problem dealing with Wolvarks, even reveling in the opportunity to kill something so remorselessly, humans were plagued by the menaces of marauding bands of lizards from early times and still tend to see them as worthy, or at least inexterminatable foes. Lastly, Wolvarks are atheist, but not by choice. There’s not really a word for “people who gods don’t believe in” but if there were, the Wolvark would be the perfect definition for it. Females Wolvark females are rarely seen, but documentation says that they’re about four times larger than the males and about as vicious. It’s been speculated that the only reason why the Wolvark has been able to maintain a place on the gently swaying scales of evolution is because of its female class, which is known to be hard to find and even harder to kill. They troll through the silt of their swamps all day like crocodiles, poised to jump up and devour anything that gets too close to their spawning grounds.